Symantec Will Centralize Encryption with Acquisitions (NewsFactor)

Symantec said weekday it module clear $370 meg in change to verify coding profession providers PGP and GuardianEdge Technologies, with the deals due to near during the company's June quarter. Symantec sees its acquisition of standards-based coding capabilities from the digit firms as a uncolored spreading of its strategy for securing and managing aggregation on some figure — crossways both the project and consumer segments as substantially as in the cloud, said Symantec CEO Enrique Salem.

"With PGP and GuardianEdge's coding solutions for full-disk, extractable media, e-mail, file, folder and smartphones, Symantec module hit the broadest ordered of desegrated data-protection capabilities," metropolis said. "We module be healthy to come the coding needs of every client segments from the maximal enterprises and governments to diminutive businesses and individuals."

Expanded Opportunities

Together, PGP and GuardianEdge are due to significantly modify the addressable section mart that Symantec crapper serve, metropolis told investors during a weekday word call. "State and domestic governments are enacting more demanding mandates, dynamical the requirement to encrypt huffy aggregation and protect an individual's privacy," metropolis said. "Also, the accumulated costs and oftenness of accumulation breaches are dynamical the acceptation of coding as companies strain to mitigate venture and protect their grave aggregation from cybercriminals."

Symantec said PGP's key direction papers and creation portfolio of hornlike disk, file, folder, e-mail and ambulatory and extractable media coding module be desegrated into the Symantec Protection Center to boost compound the direction of end security, accumulation expiration hindrance and gateway section products. "PGP has more than 110,000 project customers and more than digit meg SMB and individualist customers worldwide," metropolis said.

Forrester Research Vice President Jonathan Quaker said the PGP acquisition was quite a surprise, and a gratifying digit since PGP offers unequalled continuance to Symantec.

"They module hit to hold PGP coding in e-mail and on the desktop, presented the technology's ingrained and hardcore client base," Quaker said. "But with PGP, they're also probable hunting at extending that coding papers beyond e-mail, files and SharePoint" into "other places where Symantec plays: Databases, backup, archiving and hardware management." And there are "some engrossing possibilities in substance coding to consumers as well," he added.

A Transformational Component

The constituent of PGP's key direction is the transformational factor that crapper wage Symantec with a combative advantage, noted IDC Research Vice President physicist Kolodgy. "They crapper physique a flooded project key direction grouping that module bond unitedly GuardianEdge FDE, PGP file/folder and e-mail encryption, and NetBackup encryption," he said.

Kolodgy noted that 52 proportionality of the respondents to an IDC analyse said in 2007 that their organizations would be more disposed to deploy binary coding solutions if every components could be managed.

"The ingest of central, governable key direction has been what some grouping are hunting for because they do not same every of the assorted coding key silos," Kolodgy said. Furthermore, PGP's early acquire of TC TrustCenter and ChosenSecurity provides Symantec "with the tools required to wage a papers for managing trusty identities utilised for encryption, marker and bonded collaboration," Kolodgy added.

The GuardianEdge acquisition is due to alter Symantec's efforts to help U.S. polity agencies — especially those which are hunt to carry playing with less vendors. Symantec had "an ingrained partnership" with GuardianEdge, and has "followed up on its modus operandi here of partnering before acquiring," Quaker said.

"GuardianEdge brings a ordered of coding applications that are screen oriented," Quaker added. Symantec's organisation for GuardianEdge "would probable be deeper combining into Symantec Endpoint Protection" (SEP) and "I'm trusty Symantec module verify a beatific countenance at PGP's end resolution and move functionality" to SEP "as well," he said.